Money is transferred, documents cleared and designs reviewed with growing ease all across the world.

This growing abundance of global interaction empowers people both in good and bad ways. While it should be easier to provide for global well-being, it has also become easier to create economic monopolies or distribute physical destruction.

Faceless people have learned how to hide behind anonymity. Yet it is trust between citizens and their organisations that counts in any complex networked economy.

In Scandinavia, where governance is more transparent, and corporations cannot abuse personal information, anonymity is not so highly valued. Reciprocity in the form of the golden rule is found in all major religions. Without accountability there cannot be reciprocity and our belief in justice is shattered.

Perhaps the only way to retain both our societal trust and freedom may be a transparent society where we would have to give up much of our privacy. In order to have a balance of power and trust simultaneously, our organisations should be even more transparent than individuals and restricted in their power to utilise our information so they would not dominate us.

Perhaps privacy is a hedonistic value, and hiding not necessary either for economic success or societal stability. Sadly, the internet helps both concealment and openness.

A crucial issue here is the potential rise of electronic cash. If someone can send me a blackmailing letter, and fulfill the threat anonymously on the internet, and also anonymously collect the money over the internet, it could not be controlled without massive global National Security Agency-type spying organisations - especially if the net does not support tracing.

We may need global clearing of all electronic cash to avoid these problems. We can develop systems so that crimes can be effectively detected without any need for spying.

This is the route a free and open society should take. If we instead are too afraid of the risks in an open society, we easily give away our freedom and voluntarily yield power to such organisations whose actions we cannot control.

Hopefully this does not happen and privacy is not dearer to us than freedom. When Karl Popper wrote his Open Society, there were very few really global networks. Even so, he maintained that no one should have hierarchical power over all issues.

As more and more issues become global, citizens feel too detached from power bases. Perhaps the world should not be divided just geographically. Perhaps we could be citizens of several states simultaneously - one physical and several virtual, based on our needs and inter ests.

Currently the physical state has all responsibilities and global matters are governed by organisations getting their mandate from local governments. One of the few exceptions is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the body that manages internet domain names.

If we want people to feel they really can influence global issues within their interest, we should perhaps consider virtual localities and some sort of semi-independent democracy within these.

Another issue is our growing capability through networks and automated production lines to manufacture copies of just about anything. Value is in bits, and the one who gets them copyrighted or patented first gets all the profit.

One could argue that the first to get something patented has created the added value but this is mostly not true. More and more often, this leads only to greater profits for economically developed countries and poverty for the countries who could have invented the same things later.

There is no added value when an organisation patents or copyrights ideas that would be apparent to almost everybody else within a few years. The current global system for handling intellectual property rights severely limits free flow of ideas and consequently gives unfair advantage to developed countries. Our world is being redefined. Old structures and beliefs try to defend themselves.

Much of the current digital divide could be cured with such egalitarian practices that respect freedom of people and ideas in the spirit of the golden rule. If all the positive benefits of networking could be harnessed, developing nations could prosper and sustainable growth could be reached, as much of the material production can be replaced by virtual systems with decreasing energy consumption. Hopefully this is not only a dream.